View of the forest canopy from canopy platform
The sky-scraping rainforest
The canopy is a forest's first point of contact with sky. A never ending but always changing stream of sunlight, wind, and precipitation washes across the tree tops, triggering a barrage of life-sustaining chemical reactions that reverberate from the crowns of the trees down to the tips of the roots. Above all, sunlight energy is captured, carbon dioxide molecules are coupled together, oxygen and water are released, and life goes on.
Like other contact points in nature, such as the nutrient-rich estuaries of rivers, the forest canopy is an ecologically dynamic world, a crucible of life. "using one conservative estimate, "says DR. Ring, head of university of Victoria's Entomology Department, "We expect to find about 2000 species of insects and arthropods in the oldgrowth tree canopy in Carmanah Valley. Many of these will be new species never before described."
Researcher gathering insect samples
For Richard Ring and Neville Winchester, scaling the heights of the Carmanah rainforest is a little bit like Darwin surveying the mysteries of the Galapagos. In the forest canopy they have come face to face with a busy, complex and entirely foreign wed of life that no one even imagined existed, let alone studied. This is a world of beetles, moths, bees, ants, flies, mites and collembola (pencil-sized "springtails") that thrive in the mats of the rich green moss that cover the branches of the old-growth canopy. It is also a world populated with mysterious lichens, a world draped draped with unknown epiphytes.
"Scientists talk a lot these days about the pyramid of life," says Ring." The top the pyramid is where you find the high profile lifeforms -the bear and the eagles. "But more and more we are looking at the base of the pyramid, Which is Where you find the building blocks of life-the countless micro-organisms. The next level up from the microorganisms is that of the insects and all the other non-vertebrate species. That's the level of life we are studying in Upper Carmanah. And it is fundamental to gaining a basic understanding of the ecology of the temperate rainforest."
In January 1993, Paul George, WCWC founder and executive director in charge of research and publications, asked B.C. Forest Minister Dan Miller to convert the Wilderness Committee's year to year renewable Special Use Permit for its Upper Carmanah Valley Research Station to a five -year renewable term. Such added security of tenure for the station would give the scientists using it some greater assurance that research projects which take several years to complete would not come to a premature end due to clearcutting of their research sites.
Forest Minister Dan Miller's answer was "no". Without Resources and Environment(CORE).Which is currently Working on recommendations for further park protection for all of Vancouver Island except Clayoquot sound. the upper Carmanah could be lost..
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